Houseful of Guests!

by Sriraksha Bhagavan – The place where I stay during my field visit at Coorg is also a room for many insects and not just for me. From the very first few days until now, whenever I go I have always been accompanied by different kinds of guests – be it a praying mantis, cicada, huntsman spiders, jumping spiders, earwigs, termites, cockroaches, fireflies, mites, wasps, moths, ants, bugs, beetles and occasionally scorpions and etc. It left me wondering that a small room by itself is so diverse and how it must be outside!!

And I wondered who would get a good peaceful sleep and not be scared with all these insects walking and flying around in the room and seeing the lizards on the wall trying to catch them and fall!?

On one dark night, after the rains, thousands of termites decided to be my guests by trying to get inside my room for the light, striking against each other and falling on to the ground and the hungry lizards would come out of their hiding place to have a feast. They kept me awake as they took away my bed and kept crawling on me. And the next morning it was such a big mess to clean!!

On another night, while watching a hungry lizard trying to catch a dragonfly buzzing around the tube light, something fell on my bed from the wall and I thought it was lizard poop. When I went closer to get rid of that poop from my bed the poop started moving. It looked like a tiny UFO carrying hundreds of white little aliens that had crashed on my bed. One by one, pushing each other, these tiny aliens started deporting their spaceship to start their mission. As soon as they touched the ground (my bed) they started running all over my bed and then even climbed on me!! I caught these little fellows in a tube so that I could get some sleep. The next morning I saw that they looked as creepy as their mother, all of them darkly pigmented, tiny cockroaches, moving their antennaes left and right, up and down! And how would you feel when an insect that freaks you out the most starts its journey of life on your bed?!